Monday, 24 March 2014

Sky or the Birds Workshop

On Wednesday the 12th of March all of our students were offered a free workshop led by Dan Horrigan (for FREE!).

Dan Horrigan is a writer who works with ‘Sky or the Bird’ theatre company, they recently visited Bathway to preview their new show ‘Still I see my baby’.

In this workshop we explored many ideas used in the production of a new piece of theatre, such as; “What is the premise?”, “What is important?”, “What are the characters' objectives?”.
These questions challenged us to think in a more in depth way bout how the play could be staged.

Using different ideas on the same scene was something that I really enjoyed doing; Dan gave us a scene from his play and asked us work on it in our own way, this allowed him to see fresh takes on his text, and allowed us to see how many different ways you can interpret the same section of text. When we then watched the play the next day we were able to see the way that the director interpreted the same scene with the help of the actors.

The last exercise that we did was creating a story; we were split into pairs and had to decide a premise, character objectives and finally create a coherent story involving our ideas. We then showed the rest of the group what we had created and gave them a chance to guess the premise of our story, which mostly turned out to be correct! I really enjoyed this workshop; I learnt new things that will be very useful in the future.